Hello Dartmouth Parents!
My daughter is trying to decide between Dartmouth and two other schools, but Dartmouth is her #1 right now. Something important to all of us is the relative happiness of the faculty under the present administration. At a school that’s top in undergraduate education and touts its amazing “scholars who teach”, my concern is that strong faculty might leave if frustrated with the Dartmouth administration. I teach at a university and know well how leadership can either make or break a department or school. Thanks for any opinions on this. I’ve been looking at past “The Dartmouth” newspapers and was struck by an excellent letter that seemed almost a plea to President Hanlon to actively listen to Dartmouth students, faculty and staff.
I recommend reading dartblog.com – and, yes, Joe is something of a gadfly, but I think he does a good job of reporting what he hears. Your concerns are not unfounded, but I’m not sure I would bail on Dartmouth at this point. Many (almost all) of the professors who were part of my 13’s experience are still there (and the couple who are not just retired in the normal scheme of things). I fervently hope that Hanlon will be gone before your daughter would graduate (too much to hope that he would be gone before she matriculates).
I see what you’re saying about Dartblog being a place to get info, but the vitriol with which the editor and the dartblog staff write reads a little “Make Dartmouth Great Again”. Maybe the sample of blog posts I read were just particulary pointed and complaint-filled. Zero big-hearted school spirit that I could detect (the kind my daughter’s hoping to find…).
Well … I don’t think we should let MAGA take over the concept of wanting to recover the things that made an institution special. Dartmouth was always known as a college (not a university) that prided itself on its concentration on undergraduate graduation. I tend to agree with Joe that this has not received full support of the current administration or the prior one. So I view the goal of making Dartmouth great again as (1) a demonstration of “big-hearted school spirit” and (2) a desire to return to that very fundamental (and, in my opinion, very desirable) role. Your post asked about the happiness of the faculty, and I think dartblog gives you one avenue to assess that. I doubt that you would get a better sense of things from Parkhurst Hall (the administration building).
I don’t know if your daughter will be studying computer science at Dartmouth if she attends, but if so you may be interested in this timely article, which announces that the head of the CS department is leaving for UC Berkeley. My son is a current CS major so I do wonder how that will affect him!
http://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2018/04/computer-science-professor-hany-farid-to-leave-college-for-berkeley
Dartmouth Faculty are treated poorly. This year two of the biggest names at the school are leaving, the head of cs and Brendan Nyhan. You can also look up the debacle were Professor Bong was denied tenure after unanimous support from her department.